Legacy Of Blood

Chapter 2

The plate shattered against the wall an inch from Lira's head, ceramic shards biting into her cheek before she could turn away.

"I said Hot," Joshua snapped, sprawled across the leather sofa like the whole mansion existed to hold his weight.

"That soup was ice cold, you stupid girl."

"I'm sorry, I'll…."

"You'll what?" He rose, straightening his shirt, and crossed the room slowly, the way a man moves when he knows nobody will stop him.

"Make it again? You've said that four times this week."

Lira kept her eyes on the floor, on the broken pieces scattered near her bare feet, one shard close enough that a shift of her weight would cut her.

She was eighteen now, though the years in this house had aged something in her that had nothing to do with numbers.

It was ten years since Damon's men dragged her out of the wreck.

Ten years of learning exactly how small she had to make herself to survive a room.

"Pick it up," Joshua said. "With your hands and not the broom, your hands."

She knelt.

The first piece bit into her palm and she didn't make a sound, because sound cost more than blood did in this house.

"Joshua." Damon's voice came from the doorway, unhurried, almost bored.

He stood there in a robe that probably cost more than the car that had killed his brother, watching his son the way a breeder watches a dog perform a trick.

"Don't damage her hands, she still has floors to finish before dinner tonight."

"She ruined the soup, Dad."

"Then she'll go without eating until she gets it right." Damon stepped further into the room, glancing at Lira with the same flicker of interest a man gives furniture.

"Isn't that right, girl?"

Lira didn't answer, ten years had taught her that answering was its own kind of trap.

"I asked you a question."

"Yes, sir." The words came out flat, scraped hollow of anything real.

Damon smiled like that pleased him more than an honest answer would have.

"Good girl, Now clean this up properly. We have guests coming, and I won't have this family embarrassed because you can't manage a kitchen."

He turned and walked out, and Joshua lingered a moment longer, close enough that Lira could feel his shadow over her.

"You used to have more fight in you," he said quietly, almost thoughtful, like he was remembering an old toy that had lost its spark.

"What happened to that?"

*You happened,* she thought, gathering the last of the shards into her cut palm. *Both of you happened.*

He walked away laughing under his breath, and Lira knelt alone on the marble floor, blood mixing faintly pink into the water from the spilled soup, and for one moment she let herself remember her mother's kitchen.

It was warm, loud and safe.

Then she swallowed the memory back down, because memories were currency here too.

She couldn't afford to spend them on grief when there were floors left to scrub.

********

Outside the estate wall, hidden in the shadow of an old oak that had probably stood there longer than the mansion itself.

Larry lay flat against the cool grass, a high-lens camera pressed to his eye.

He'd been coming to this spot for three weeks now.

Three weeks of watching, preparing, learning the rhythm of the house, the guard rotations, the hours the family kept, the small human weaknesses that would eventually c***k this place open.

He had told himself he was gathering intelligence.

He had told himself this was strategy, not torment.

But when the camera's lens found Lira through the tall kitchen window, when he watched Joshua throw that plate, when he watched his sister kneel and gather broken ceramic into bleeding hands without a sound, strategy went out of him like air from a punctured lung.

"God," he breathed, the word cracking in half.

His finger found the shutter on instinct, the mechanical click swallowed by the wind, capturing her face in that frozen moment, jaw tight, eyes dry because she had learned not to cry where anyone could see it.

He had been documenting cruelty for three weeks.

He told himself it was evidence.

Sitting here now, watching his little sister's blood drip pink into dishwater, he understood it was something closer to penance.

He was making himself watch because he had promised her, once, ten years ago, screaming her name through broken glass, that he would come for her.

And instead he had spent six years building an empire brick by brick, and only now, only after money and men and a name people feared, had he finally come close enough to see her face again.

It was too long and it had taken too long.

His hand shook around the camera.

Rage built low in his chest, a heat that had nothing gentle left in it.

"I'm here, Lira," he whispered, though she was fifty yards away and couldn't possibly hear him.

"I'm here now."

He lowered the camera slightly, jaw tight, watching her rise from the floor, watching her carry the bowl of bloodied water toward the sink like it was just another Tuesday in hell.

He had seen enough tonight. He'd seen enough for three weeks.

He knew the guard schedule.

He knew which door stayed unlocked between two and three in the morning when the night shift changed.

He knew Damon slept heaviest after his nightly scotch, and Joshua slept in the east wing, closest to the gardens, closest to the wall Larry currently lay against.

Everything was in place.

Every piece of the plan he'd built for six months sat ready, waiting only for his signal.

He raised the camera one final time, meaning only to capture the layout of the eastern corridor lights for his notes.

Instead, the lens found something else.

A second figure, moving low along the garden path in the dark, cutting toward the same unlocked door Larry had marked for his own approach.

Larry went still, breath caught in his throat.

The figure wasn't one of Damon's guards.

The posture was not right, it was too careful, too deliberate, someone who knew exactly how to move without being seen.

Someone who clearly had the same idea Larry did, the same target, the same door.

The figure paused beneath a security light just long enough for the lens to catch a face Larry hadn't expected to ever see again, a face burned into memory from another lifetime entirely.

Larry's hands went cold around the camera.

"No," he whispered. "It can't be."

Because the person moving through Damon's garden in the dead of night, three weeks into Larry's careful surveillance, one night before his planned assault on the estate, was someone Larry had buried in his memory right alongside his mother.

Someone who was supposed to be dead.